The project objective was to implement a set of methods for forecasting flows based on radar images in a high performance computing environment that can be linked to the decision support systems already installed in the control rooms of municipal water utilities.

The project developed the hard- and software for a new weather radar system to allow for accurate rainfall forecast in urban areas, responding to an increasing demand from the utilities in charge of urban networks (sewage and drainage networks, waste water treatment plants, drinking water plants ). The system, which has been further developed into a commercial product, helps to

• reduce the number of stormwater alerts due to accurate radar images integrated in the decision support systems,
• better manage critical rainfall situations by choosing the optimal management strategy, i.e. reducing CSO (Combined Sewer Overflows) events and increasing the stability of biological sewage treatment processes.

Environmental Monitoring and Management Systems

The objectives of this project were to respond to end-user needs by developing and installing:

• Regional environmental management systems for providing global, real-time information.
• Water quality monitoring and assessment methods for providing on-line quality information, allowing automatic, remote and intelligent monitoring stations.
• Active Decision Support for the operators to adapt the process controls to sudden changes in the environment.

The main focus of EM2S was the integration of emerging software technologies in a framework to allow easy interfacing to existing SCADA systems and - through one of the partners - integration in a new generation of such systems for the Water Industry. In particular this implied:

• Advanced algorithms for sensor data fusion and validation, such as Kohonen Maps and Fuzzy Logic.
• Knowledge-Based and Case Based Reasoning techniques for decision support.
• Presentation techniques addressing all levels of users, from the operator to the authorities.
• An agent-oriented software framework integrating these techniques allowing efficient adaptation to and configuration of specific application requirements

WaterNet - Distributed Water Quality Monitoring using Sensor Networks

Operators at treatment plants have to manage large amounts of data, from on-line sensors and from laboratory analyses. Distributed sensor networks covering a complete river basin make this task even more difficult. There is a strong need for appropriate methods and tools to achieve a clear assessment of the current state of the water quality, to quickly detect major pollution events and to assess trends of the water quality, both short and long term. Current control and supervision systems do not fulfil these needs and it is the objective of WaterNet not only to provide the users with a suitable technology but to demonstrate in real-life applications the usability and appropriateness of newly developed methods that will help both operators and authorities by an intelligent aggregation and simplification of the vast amount of environmental measurement data. These methods are the result of the research and development carried out in ESPRIT Project 6757 - EMS (Environmental Monitoring Systems). Together with the users of three validation sites, the emphasis in WaterNet will be on:

• Aggregation (fusion) of sensor data to simplify their understanding.
• Assessment and Interpretation of the river state and its evolution.
• Presentation of information of different levels of abstraction to specific but widely varying user classes.

Industrial manufacturing in Middle East is still  behind Europe and the Western World, both in quantity and quality. Despite the tremendous market potential of an area of several hundred million inhabitants, local industry will continue to fight a loosing battle against imports as long as it does not bring its quality standards to an equal, international level. The advantageous labour rates of the local industry will only bear fruits on the competitive global markets if no doubt remains about the quality of the goods produced. Stable quality of products can only be achieved through rigid adherence to well-defined control procedures, covering the entire life-cycle of products, from raw material to after-sales services. While the introduction of overall Quality Management is a first step that has to be followed by an integrated control system for the production processes, the success of Quality Management depends on its acceptance by the work force. To bring such changes in the working culture about requires intensive creation of awareness and training.

The main achievements of the project were

1. The development of a modular Quality Management and Control software running under Windows95 / NT, US and Arabic version. The software provides a bilingual system with an Arabic interface to all data-input modules required on shop-floor level and an English report generator and interface for all management and diagnosis modules. An interactive Arabic tutorial software was also developed together with System documentation and User Manual.

2. A fully installed system at a paper manufacturer in Egypt (Pyramids Paper Mills).